Please do not require AVX support for your software

Ok, I asked from MongoDB:

https://jira.mongodb.org/browse/SERVER-74457

It also seems like Clickhouse could offer runtime detection of AVX and dispatch to the optimized functions in that case.

"Please do not require racing slicks for your formula one cars, some of us are still racing with wooden wagon wheels and can't afford to upgrade to Bridgestone rubber tyres."

The listed excuses are all in the category: "We've been doing things wrong, sometimes for a decade or more, please don't make us change our erroneous ways!"

First of all, if anyone is using any kind of cloud hosting, then there is no excuse. Zero. None. All public clouds allow the choice of CPUs with instruction sets up to and including AVX-512. It's a dropdown menu. Go look at the options it has.

You didn't, did you? You deployed your high performance data warehouse cluster (Clickhouse) with the default VM SKU, didn't you? Admit it. That's a pile of money you'd rather burning than admit that you are too lazy to even glance at the menu options when creating a $50K/month VM cluster.[1]

The next one is the VMware Enhanced vMotion Compatibility (EVC), which allows specific CPU features to be masked out, enabling old servers to coexist with new servers in a single cluster. This too, is a setting that was almost certainly set once when the cluster was created, and nobody bothered to revisit the setting a decade later. I bet 95% VMware clusters with AVX masked are running on hardware 100% capable of using AVX. Again, this is leaving a ton of performance on the floor. Heck, I've seen brand new, uniform-hardware clusters with AVX-512 capable CPUs lobotomised down to SSE4.2 because admins have no clue what EVC actually does.

I remember reading the same articles by admins just as lazy as the guy from that rant when 64-bit-only server software first appeared. "It's too hard to ask the SOE team to make a 64-bit SOE!", or "Our backup software from 1999 doesn't support 64-bit!", etc...

[1] I watched several customers make this mistake, not just occasionally, but literally every time. We eventually had to block the 11-year-old VM SKUs using cloud policies to stop the unfathomable laziness.

I have still a Intel Westmere cpu running, which is the CPU iteration before Sandy Bridge. Honestly this platform is outdated, its inefficient and slow. It's not even cheap, considering you can get Broadwell/Epyc Rome cheap from Ebay today. I'm just running it, because I have not had time to migrate yet and it works. I could probably run it for another 10 years, as long I don't update anything.

However if Linux should require a new CPU generation, I would quickly migrate it to my Epyc Rome VM server. No questions asked. A 10 years old CPU is outdated, its single core performance may be ok. But this generation had 4-6 cores max and sucked 100watts at full load, like 25 watt per cor. My Epyc uses 2 watt per core and is also faster per core.

Quite an edge case but Graylog 5 requires MongoDb 5 which requires AVX.

I was unable to get this setup on my 3 year old nas (920+) and had to resort to running an older version which will most likely stop getting updates very soon. AVX is old but apparently Intel decided to keep it out of certain line ups.